Laudy Aron is a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Since joining Urban in 1992, she has spent over 25 years conducting research and policy analysis on a wide range of social welfare issues, including health and disability, education, employment and training, homelessness, and family violence. She directed and coedited a ground-breaking 2013 study for the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine on US Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, which found a large and growing US “health disadvantage” relative to other high-income countries. Her work focuses on how social and economic conditions shape health and well-being, and how social welfare programs (broadly defined) can best support healthy human development across the life course and over time and place.